Forums Feature Suggestions Modernise mIRC

Don't panic, this isn't yet another GUI update suggestion, but rather a suggestion make mIRC's behaviour more modern.

- Make the move from INI/registry to XML. Since XML files allow multiple layers whereas ini files don't, the settings file could be made to make a lot more sense. And people wouldn't need to download something like mirc.ini unleashed (for example), to decipher what's in it.
- Add an option to the installer to install a version that uses a more XP/vista-ish icon.
- Add an auto updater. Something to check for updates and report them would be enough, but to actually download and run new installers would be brilliant.
- Add an option to make mIRC start when windows does.
- Make .mrc files open in mIRC when double clicked. If already loaded, open script editor and select script, otherwise load it and do the same.

That all sounds like a good idea. The part about auto updating shouldn't be too hard to do. I know with Visual Studio, you can have your application check a website for updates and automatically prompt the user to install.

I believe mirc is delphi code, not that it would be much harder to do.



As long as this feature is made completely optional (changable from WITHIN each mirc installation), something like 'allow loading of script through explorer' or similar, then im all for it. Otherwise is should skip the 'load it and do the same' part for that mirc instance. Not sure how easy it would be to implement though, since file associations are made to specific installations (maybe it could use a call to dde method or something i dont know).

I guess just changing the file association would be easiest but many users are not aware of how to do that.

no, it's c++, previously written in borland (because of 16/32 parallel dev) and switched to visual studio a few versions back (which caused a reorder of the nicks in the nicklist amongst other things). at least that is what I picked up through different posts on the forum over the years

Things like winamp/windows media player have a list of different file extensions that they support with a checkbox next to each one so you can choose whether it should be associated with winamp/wmp. Wmp goes a step further by showing a greyed out tick (indeterminate) if another application is associated with the file, but the user told WMP to take over it.

Something like that could work well. Perhaps with .ini files mIRC could just add an option to the right click menu because not all inis will be scripts.

I seem to recall seeing the .mrc suggestion before. If I remember correctly, the main issue was that if there were multiple copies of mIRC on the computer, how would Windows know which one should handle .mrc files? This problem doesn't come into effect with winamp/WMP because they only allow one copy to be installed at a time, or only one copy can be associated with each filetype.

I think it would be neat if mIRC was changed so that only a single copy could be installed, but so that single install could run as many different sessions as you want without having one session corrupt another session's files/settings. What comes to mind is to have a root mIRC directory with subdirectories that would contain completely separate data/scripts/etc for each session. When mIRC started, there would be several options to choose which session should be used (command line switches, default session, session choice dialog, etc). This would also allow the .mrc extension to be added to Windows. When someone right-/double-clicks a .mrc file, a dialog would open asking which session (directory) the file should be associated with. (BTW, I made this idea up on the fly, so there are likely to be some changes necessary).

-genius_at_work

The same thing could be said about launching URLs currently. It's a problem, but it's a user problem rather than a design problem. There could be an option in the installer that says "Register .mrc file extensions with this copy of mIRC" or something.